Today was a big day in English. Everyone had to turn in their Poetry Island Essay with the rubric. Any essay not turned in today will have a 5% deduction in grade for each day it is late.

Everyone logged into the blog and had to follow the directions on the TweenTribune page to register on the TweenTribune site. It was pretty easy if you read the instructions as you went along. Any student who did not get registered must come into Mrs. Scales classroom before or after school or use their home computer on their own time to get registered before Wednesday. There will be an assignment during QW time on Wednesday using the TweenTribune site and everyone must be registered.

We also selected root words from an envelope. There were no new root words. All of the root words selected were from the second semester root words that we have already been given in class. That means that everyone should already have a root word card for each root word and it should be listed in their glossaries. Starting Wednesday we will begin giving root word presentations. We have to present in any way we choose (rap song, jingle, repeating activity, visual examples) the root word we are responsible for in 3 to 5 minutes. In a couple of weeks we will have our big second semester root word test and extra credit will be given to the student who presented the word review presentation based on how many other students get that word correct on the test. This is our turn to teach. Lets see how good we are at it.

The lesson today was on Grammatical Sentence Types, but when we looked at the first definition Mrs. Scales realized that we needed to review some vocabulary in order to really understand what we were doing. So we backed up a little and reviewed what a clause is, the two types of clauses and what a predicate is.

A clause is a group of words with a subject and a predicate. There can be main or independent clauses, which are groups of words with a subject and a predicate that can stand alone. The other type of clause is a subordinate or dependent clause, which as the name indicates is a group of words with a subject and a predicate that can not stand alone.

A predicate is a verb or a verb plus something. Some examples of predicates include:
She dances. (verb-only predicate)
Ben reads the book. ( verb + a direct object)
Ben’s mother, Felicity, gave me a present. (verb + an indirect object without a preposition)
She listened to the radio. (verb + a prepositional object)

After getting an understanding of the terms we were going to use, we started looking at the four types of sentences:

A simple (S) sentence has one main clause and no subordinate clauses. It can however, contain a compound subject or predicate.

A compound sentence has two or more main clauses.

A complexsentence uses both main and subordinate clauses. A complex sentence has one independent clause and at least one dependent clause.

A compound-complex sentence is a combination of the compound and the complex sentence structure. It has two or more independent clauses and at least one dependent clause.

We made a foldable with the definitions of each type of sentence. Then broke several example sentences down as a whole class to practice finding the clauses, determining if the clause was independent or dependent and then labeling the sentence as simple, compound, complex or compound-complex. We did a few of the sentences on the homework assignment together to make sure everyone understood how to finish the assignment.